5 Steps to building a Facebook audience in Africa – Part 2

Invite Family, Friends, and Friends of Friends: Facebook gives you the option as an administrator of a page to be able to invite friends to a page and even automatically add friends to groups. This is pretty amazing as you can easily leverage on that to get from 100 to 500. If you are lucky enough, they also get to invite their friends (I have seen a Facebook community grow this way to about 1000 fans). Taking it up a notch will be actually telling current fans to invite friends, and in turn you can offer incentives from public recognition to freebies and prizes. However it is best to have fans – i.e. people who are actually interested in what the Facebook page or group is all about, as they easily go from fans to become advocates that will get more fans and keep engagement level on the platform at a high level.You don’t want to end up with 1000 Likes and only 5 people talking about it.

Spend-A-Little: Run Facebook Ads: Social media is mostly free and you do not need to pay to get a Facebook account, but be ready to spend a little when it comes to increasing reach. I do mean it when I say ‘spend-a-little’, as the cost of running Facebook Ads is very affordable by any standard. How does $1 for 500-1000 fans sound? It is important to you know your target and run different campaigns for different demographics and pyschographics. Fortunately Facebook allows you to easily monitor and tune variables such as location, gender, age, likes and interests, relationship status, workplace, and education, while serving the Ads. See more at facebook.com/advertising. You are totally in charge of how much you spend, whether it’s daily, weekly and monthly. So you can run parallel Facebook ads targeted at different groups, and choose to turn ads on or off anytime.

Engage, Disengage, Re-engage: So, yes, you have a Facebook page with many fans and the ads are running, but the aim is to build a Facebook audience and not a crowd. The Facebook page or group should not be taken as a place to only disseminate information but also an avenue to get feedback and ask questions. Updates can come in form of: Questions, Polls, and further engagements can be built around images, videos, and other media forms.Therefore strife to have at least one post per day and make it a two way communication, not one. You may also want to stimulate engagement by running campaigns and giving out freebies or any form of recognition.Extra: Don’t forget to work on a landing page and device means to collect data: email, telephone numbers, BlackBerry Pins (but let the audience willingly give you these data). Call to Action ‘buttons’, and links to landing page with much more information should be worked on and placed on Facebook Ads and group or page updates.

That is all I have got for now and sure will be updating you with any other steps that I uncover in my social media journey. Feel free to share yours too. You can also ask your questions using the comment box below.